Over the twentieth century and into the present, theorists of secularization and political theology have explored ways that theological arguments have shaped the social, ethical, economic, and political imaginaries of the modern West. In many of these studies, the doctrine of providence has come under scrutiny alongside related theological debates over of the nature of divine sovereignty, glory, the will, and the significance of immanent life in relation to divine transcendence. While it is often taken for granted that the Calvinist branch of Protestant reform likewise had a decisive impact on the shape of the modern West, there has been no extended treatment of Calvin's writing on providence, or related doctrines, which engages these arguments about secularization.

Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2015-12-03T10:10:55Z No. of bitstreams: 1 claudiomano.pdf: 1529033 bytes, checksum: ff8048987cf78c54f94024449693928f (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2015-12-03T11:54:33Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 claudiomano.pdf: 1529033 bytes, checksum: ff8048987cf78c54f94024449693928f (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-12-03T11:54:33Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 claudiomano.pdf: 1529033 bytes, checksum: ff8048987cf78c54f94024449693928f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-03-02 / Ao longo desta dissertação, procuramos identificar, na obra do magistrado francês em pauta, não apenas o uso tácito do conceito de religião civil elaborado por Jean-Jacques Rousseau, de quem Tocqueville foi leitor. Somos do parecer de que uma melhor compreensão do processo da democracia norte-americana, tal como descrita por Aléxis de Tocqueville em sua obra magna, implica descortinarmos, nas entrelinhas dessa obra, a possibilidade de tratá-la com base no conceito de teologia política negativa, que nos permite alcançar os fundamentos da sacralização das instituições democráticas nos Estados Unidos da América. / The aim of this research is to investigate not only the pregnance of Rousseaus´s civil religion concept in Alexis Tocqueville´s analysis of eighteenth century´s United States of America democratic environment. Our main goal is to demonstrate that the concept of negative political theology can help us to go further in the understanding of the fundamentals of the democratic institutions´sacralization process as it is presented in Tocqueville´s De la démocratie en Amérique.

In this essay, I examine the correlation between time and politics in Martin Hägglunds philosophical project. By examining the view of time and politics in the works of the theologian David Bentley Hart, I establish a discussion that exposes different metaphysical standings and raises new questions. I conduct this examination in the light of the ongoing discussion about theology and political emancipation in the field of political theology. One of the main conclusions of the essay is that an important division appear between an ontological and a Christian eschatological concept about the relationship between time and eternity. I also conclude that the belief in a transcendental sphere that intervene in history can bring forth different types of political implications, which all tend to lean towards a concept about this world as a second to last. Throughout this essay, I deepen my discussion concerning the supposed emancipatory or totalizing political consequences of this cosmology, which, in this essay, is represented mainly by Hägglund and Hart.

This dissertation offers new insights into Carl Schmitt's early Catholic thought, especially Die Sichtbarkeit der Kirche and Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form. Focusing on the concept of "form," I examine Schmitt's idiosyncratic usage of the term, its theological underpinnings, and the implication of Schmitt's early Catholic thought for understanding his place in the history of mid-20th-century political thought. Schmitt is best known as a political theorist of "decisionism" and "the exception," who favors the extra-legal, irrational, and existential in shaping "the political." His theory arises from theological commitments later obscured by his association with the Nazis. I argue that Schmitt's theological perspective and his concept of form reinforce one another by elevating a particular brand of personalist, juridical rationality that establishes the basis of a polemic against the irrational in political and religious life. Placing Schmitt's concept of political form in dialogue with his Catholic public intellectualism, I explore Schmitt's early attempts to overcome the form/substance dichotomy in political theory through his use of theological constructs. Beginning with responses of other high-profile Catholic intellectuals to Sichtbarkeit and Römischer Katholizismus, I find that concerns with political form, representation, and the threats of the "mechanization" of liberal bureaucracy and anarchic atheism were shared by Schmitt's peers. Through an analysis of Schmitt's early articulations of the relationship between form and substance--in his strictly legal and political writings and in his Catholic writings--I demonstrate that Schmitt emphasizes public belief, community, political action, and "personalist" representation as conditions of a viable social life. Close reading of Schmitt's theological inquiry shows that his characterization of God, Christ, human nature, and the earthly and divine kingdoms fits his understanding of political form and human sovereignty. I argue that Schmitt's theological perspective is both humanized and rendered problematic by his privileging of "form," a concept that benefits from his theological perspective, while also being hindered by it.

Thesis advisor: Andrew Prevot / Decisions: Political Theology and the Challenges of Postmodernity, argues that political theologies are both partially responsible for and responsive to the intrinsically related problems of racism, capitalism, and essentialist metaphysical thinking. Relying on dialectical materialist and post-structuralist theories, Decisions critically engages a wide range of classical and contemporary figures such as Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, Carl Schmitt, Jacques Derrida, James Cone, Chantal Mouffe, Cornel West, Martin Hågglund, and Karl ove Knausgaard. These engagements are attentive to not only the particular theoretical and political decisions any one thinker makes, but also to the ways in which “decision” is itself understood as an important theoretical and political category. Although “decisionism” has become a popular motif in contemporary political theology, the concept remains under theorized. This is unfortunate, because contemporary ontological racisms and exploitative market structures aim to prevent political decisions: ontological racism decides in advance the essential “racial” characteristics of a person and market economies ensure that the distribution of goods is “decided” by the so- called invisible hand of the market. Moreover, both racisms and capitalism can imply an underlying modern metaphysics of substance and essence. While the postmodern critique of metaphysics is often read as a challenge to religion, this reading suggests that postmodernity presents an opportunity for the reemergence of an historical and politically engaged form of religion. Such an emancipatory and non-metaphysical approach can be found throughout various religious traditions, but is especially prominent amongst black political theologians working out of the Christian tradition. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

This study explores the semiotic development of Islamic nationalism as a form of political theology during its formative period of 1857-1947 as articulated in the writings of prominent Urdu-speaking theologians. The study presents Islamic nationalism as a project of Muslims’ collective emancipation from colonialism and the possible subjugation of Islam and Muslims to the post-colonial secular state. Islamic nationalism’s constructive task is to interpret Islamic symbols in political terms toward articulating a modern Muslim nationalism. Its critical task is to critique the modern ideas of secularism, nationalism, and colonialism, on the one hand; and Muslim history with respect to a historiography centered on the primacy of caliphate as a spiritual-political institution, on the other hand. Politically, Islamic nationalism seeks, albeit in modern forms, Muslims’ religio-cultural autonomy and/or political sovereignty. In semiotic terms, Islamic nationalism integrates the Islamic symbols of islām, God, Prophet Muhammad, the Qur'an, qaum, sharīʿat, millat, ummat, and khilāfat with the symbols of secular nationalism, namely, nation, freedom, equality, and popular sovereignty. The extent and nature of the integration is determined by the internal consistency of the Islamic symbolic system which requires the national symbols to be interpreted in light of Islam’s sacred symbols. Islamic nationalism thus amounts to the desecularization/decolonization of Muslim imagination and the public sphere. Among the different forms of Islamic nationalism, the study explores the proto-nationalist Sayyid Ahmad Khan; the proponents of a secular post-colonial India, Abul Kalam Azad and Jamʻiyyatul ʿUlamā Hind; the critics of secular nationalism, Muhammad Iqbal and Sayyid Abu’l Aʻlā Maududi; and the advocates of separatism Jamʻiyyat ʿUlamā-i Islām. The study concludes that, despite the diversity of approaches to Islam and nationalism, nearly four decades of political theology proved decisive in popularizing the idea that Muslim nationality (qaumiyyat) was based on religion, that Islam as the consummate religion brooked no division between private-religion and public-politics, and that the obligation to implement Islamic law and ethics (sharīʿat) necessitated territorial sovereignty.

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This text examines the sovereignty concept in Sayyid Qutb´s final book Milelstones, with a focus on the political and non-political aspects of the concept. The analysis also examines potentially radical and extreme aspects in the concept. The findings show that Qutb´s sovereignty concept is a practical theology focused on what God´s sovereignty means for Muslims in belief and practice. God´s sovereignty is an encompassing concept to Qutb, which means that His exclusive right to sovereignty should permeate through the souls of Muslims and guide their actions in all spheres of life, including in politics. In a concrete form, this means that God´s law and principles should be implemented. Qutb´s sovereignty concept is not extreme, but radical because it challenges established secular orders and the hegemonic assumption in modern discourses that human beings have a right to sovereignty.

This dissertation’s aim is to evaluate the Hegelian and Catholic foundations of Carl Schmitt’s National Socialist theory of law. In 1934 Schmitt called his theory “concrete order thinking,” in contrast to both normative and decisionist theories of law. On the one hand, Schmitt positively described Hegel’s state as a “concrete order of orders” where corporations mediated between state and civil society. Despite the incompatibility of the National Socialist concepts of the Führer principle and racial identity with Hegel’s theory, Schmitt saw in the National Socialist triadic structure (State, Movement, People) a common Hegelian heritage that overcomes the dualistic principles of state vs. civil society found in liberalism. On the other hand, going beyond this Hegelian heritage, Schmitt affirmed that a defense of concrete orders requires maintaining the proper distinction between a pluralism of concrete orders and a universalist divine order. After examining the Hegelian National Socialist jurist Karl Larenz’ view that Schmitt’s concrete order theory is made more coherent by rejecting an eternal divine order, I entertain the alternative hypothesis that the Catholic perspective makes concrete order theory more coherent. Under this hypothesis, I explore the political theology in Schmitt’s earlier writings and those of his Catholic contemporaries, where appeal is made to an analogy of proportionality between church and state as “perfect societies” to uphold the distinction between divine order and plural human “concrete orders.” I argue that this appeal excessively separates divine and concrete orders and fails to see them as united through an analogy of image and archetype. At this juncture I turn to corrective supplements by Schmitt’s contemporaries who explicitly emphasized the need to conjoin church and state more intrinsically. The most promising such avenue emphasizes the paradigm of Christ as a model for the relation of church and state. Once this Christological framework is affirmed, the immanence of the Führer principle and Hegelian state personality, as well as the separation entailed in analogy of proportionality, must fall away as incompatible with concrete order thinking. To some extent Schmitt recognizes this framework himself, but it is, I argue, insufficiently articulated and leaves his thought incomplete.

New Perspectives on Paul and Marx: William Blakes œThe Chimney Sweeper in Songs of Innocence and ExperienceLianna Jean Rose ManibogDepartment of English, BYUMaster of Arts This article explores the function of religion in socio-political spheres. Karl Marx is famously against religion in all its various capacities, arguing that it is a tool used by power structures to control the masses. William Blake, the British poet, is also seen as critical of religion, and because of this his works are often read through a Marxist lens. And yet depictions of Blake as a staunchly anti-religious man dont seem to fit with what we know of him and his works. This article reexamines key texts that deal with the question of how faith and society intersect, particularly reading the works of the Apostle Paul through a Jewish understanding. In doing so, we gain a new understanding of religion as a balancing weight that combats the dangers of the oppressive governments that Marx staunchly opposed.